KuSh Audio The Clariphonic User manual

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The Clariphonictm is the world’s first and only two channel, fully
parallel dual high-shelving equalizer. Parallel equalization is
probably new to you, but the underlying process is old hat: if
you’ve ever bussed your drums to a compressor, smashed them
into artful submission, then blended the result back in with
your dry, uncompressed drum tracks, you understand parallel
processing. What makes the Clariphonic so special is that it
performs the same trick with equalization rather than
compression, and it does all of the bussing and blending
internally so you don’t need to sweat multiple signal paths,
latency issues, or any of the other small headaches that
accompany parallel processing in the era of hybrid analog &
digital recording studios.
When you couple this unique parallel architecture with the
starkly minimal, mastering grade signal path and marry it all with
the inimitable UBKtm interface, the result is an approach to
high frequency equalization unlike any other in existence. The
ability to sculpt every aspect of the upper registers from 800hz
–38k gives you a form of treble control never seen or heard
before, with an effect on the sound that is almost holographic
in its depth and realism.
The Clariphonic produces a presence, sparkle, and air that
everyone wants but few could traditionally afford to obtain.
Congratulations, you’ve just obtained it.

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Full Frequency Matrix
When your signal enters a channel on the Clariphonic, it is split
across 3 parallel paths, like 3 channels on a console. 1 of those
channels, your Full Frequency (FF) signal, goes directly to an
internal summing buss and is never processed or altered in any
way. Each of the other 2 channels is filtered thru its own
equalization circuit, and the resulting eq’d sounds are blended
in with the dry FF signal via the Focus and Clarity gain controls.
As with most console-style architectures, you can mute any of
the channels and listen to only the signal paths you wish to
hear.
• FF: pressing this switch down mutes the Full Frequency
signal from the mix buss and lets you hear only the
eq'd signals for that channel
• Out: the center position of the switches marked Out
mutes the relevant engines from the mix buss
If you want to hear the original Full Frequency signal with no
equalization applied, set all appropriate switches to the Out
position.
If you want to hear the eq’d signal by itself, either to monitor
what the band is affecting or to pass the wet signal along to
other devices for further processing, depress the FF switch for
the appropriate channel(s).
Try this: mute the Full Frequency signals and, having now solo’d
the pristine top end of this box, feed it to your favorite
sweetening compressors and saturators, thicken it up, then
blend it back in parallel on your own console or DAW. Mmmm,
tasty top end!

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A Warning, of Sorts
It takes time to become truly sensitive to the extreme hf detail and
articulation this unit brings to the table.
What may happen as you get to know the Clariphonic is that
you’ll frequently realize you’ve gone too far, so you’ll start
backing off to get it to sound balanced, and you’ll keep backing
it off in steps, over and over, until you realize that you actually
went way overboard with what was needed. This is partly
because the Clariphonic does what it does so effortlessly that
many of us have no experience or reference point to guide us,
and this is partly because this eq tends to work on frequencies
that are much higher than more traditional designs, without
grabbing the hash you don’t want. Continually turning it up
can be seductive, because it rarely offends.
When it doubt, take what you think is a sensible amount of
boost and cut it in half. Even then, you may find yourself
coming back the next day and realizing you can dial it back
even more. It really is that sneaky, that addictive.
You’ve been warned!

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The Focus Engine packs a tremendous amount of equalization
power into two switches and a knob. The primary thinking
behind this engine was to provide a seriously transformative
pair of shelves that reach deep down into the midrange to
allow for broad adjustments to the timbre and raw energy of
the sound. The corners were deliberately tuned to grab all of
the high frequencies from the ultrasonics down through the
telephonics (Lift), or to do the same but leave the telephonics
alone (Open).
The controls map out as such:
Lift ---------- |---- Lowest band, mids (~800hz) and up
Open ------- |---- Next band, upper-mids (~3k) and up
Tight ------- |---- Bell curve
Out ---------|---- Engine Bypass
Diffuse ------|---- Shelving plateau

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Lift
Lift is crack… literally. It brings out the ‘crack’ in the midrange,
and just as noticeably it lifts the entire spectra north of those
mids upwards and forwards... hence the reason for its name.
Lift is the lowest of the 6 available shelves, and it is the only
band on the Clariphonic which actually grabs any meaningful
amount of the quintessential midrange, the 800 -2.5k stuff that
our ears are the most sensitive to. This band is absolutely
amazing for breaking open the mids and top on sources that
are too low-mid heavy or boomy to coexist in a mix with other
harmonically rich sounds; boosting the top 2/3 of the sound
with Lift provides an appealing alternative to hacking apart your
precious warmth frequencies, allowing you to maintain the
phase coherence of a blooming low end while wiping away the
mud from the whole picture.
Perhaps more than any of the Clariphonic’s bands, Lift has the
power to completely transform the energy and attitude of a
recorded sound, and it can get very aggressive very fast. On
sounds that already have a lot of bite, this is almost certainly
not what you want; but on sleepy sounds that obstinately
remain hidden behind the mix no matter where you land the
fader, Lift can pull them forward and infuse them with life
without sounding like any effect was applied at all.
Listen to what Lift does to a sidestick snare sound in the
overheads, or a vocal that’s too boxy in the 200-400hz zone
and/or scooped in the 1k-2k area, or on a whole mix that’s
having trouble reaching out of the speakers . As with all the
filters on the Clariphonic, it’s tempting to fall into the trap of
turning it up more and more to hear the goodness, but it really
is crazy how little of this boost you actually need in order to
bring about meaningful change.

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Open
Open is the ‘snap’ band, turn it up on a snare and you’ll
immediately know what I mean.
Open got its name from its ability to pop the lid off a sound
and let the upper half reach for the heavens while keeping the
bottom half anchored in place. It leaves the telephonics
relatively untouched and begins to grab more in the ‘Abbey
Road Presence’ range, like 3k and upwards.
While it lives higher than Lift, Open is still part of the Focus
Engine which means it’s still nipping and enhancing harmonic
energy that is part of the ‘note value’ of the sound. At the
same time, the tone of both Focus bands is something akin to
what I would call ‘white hot’, so use it sensibly. Again, a kiss of
gain with this engine can be extremely meaningful, and even a
modest amount can stretch a sound into a very different shape
than its original form.
And as with Lift, the real power of Open lays in using it as a
‘first-stage’ filter in conjunction with the Clarity Engine. The
parallel nature of the Clariphonic allows for a tiny amount of
gain on both engines to cause serious shifts in the perceived
high frequency content of the program while adding very little
actual equalized sound to the internal mix buss. This
architecture is at the heart of why this eq sounds as natural
and unaffected as it does.
Tight & Diffuse
Simply put, Tight bends the Focus Engine’s bands into a gigantic
Bell shape, and Diffuse leaves them in a Shelving plateau.
When you switch to Tight, the lower frequency of the band
remains unchanged, but rather than rise up to a maximum level
and stay there, the curve begins to gently fall off again
somewhere in the neighborhood of 14k. This means that the
difference between the two modes is subtle, but once you learn
to hear it you’ll develop your own sense of which to use and
when.

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This control got its names from the effect it has on hi-hats
coming thru the overheads. With Diffuse engaged, the cymbals
take on a softer, more spread quality as the shelf keeps on lifting
all the way up past what we can hear. But when you switch to
Tight, the hats come more into focus as the emphasis shifts
away from the air and more towards the presence. They
actually sound tighter.
The center position on this switch, labeled Out, is a killswitch
for the entire Focus Engine. It allows you to essentially ‘mute’
the eq’d signal from the internal mix buss.

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The whole point of the Clarity Engine was to give engineers
access to the kinds of ultrasmooth, pristinely analog high
frequencies normally found only in very expensive and coveted
equalizers. Units like Massenburg’s 8200, the venerable Sontec,
Cranesong’s amazing IBIS… most of us will never have the
privilege of gracing our racks with any of these stunning
processors, which is a shame, because they offer something up
top that almost everyone wants.
Your days of wanting are over. The controls, in a nutshell:
Presence ------|---- Bite, cutting thru (~5k)
Sheen --------- |---- Old fashioned treble (~9k)
Out ----------- |---- Engine bypass
Shimmer ------ |---- Electricity (~19k)
Silk ------------ |---- Pure air (~39k)
Presence
Presence is a very special band that almost deserves its own
engine, because it doesn’t possess the harmonically dense
power of the Focus bands, nor is it nearly as subtle or rarified
as the rest of the Clarity bands. But I placed it in the Clarity

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Engine because it layers well with a touch of Lift or Open from
the Focus Engine.
What sets Presence apart from all the other bands on the
Clariphonic is its ability to radically alter how audible a sound is
in a mix without actually pulling it upwards. Instead, it pulls
things straight towards you; it makes elements more present by
enhancing their ability to cut thru the mix without changing
the underlying, fundamental timbre. This is a potent weapon in
the fight for space in a harmonically dense mix.
When you want your snare or hats to have more bite, when
you want acoustic guitars to cut through even while tucking
them deep into the mix, this band may be a magic bullet for
you. Likewise, Presence is the ultimate eq for vocals that have
beautiful tone and texture but are simply too ‘soft’ to make it
to the front of the mix without overwhelming the song. Try it
on a vocal tracked thru a 58, the transformation is crazy.
On the flipside, in our almost-universally-digital world of
recordings, Presence is the most risky filter to engage, because if
your 4k-6k region has any harshness or brittleness whatsoever
this band will let you know in no uncertain terms. If you like
what this shelf does to your sound’s behavior but don’t like the
way it draws out aspects of the tone that are less than stellar,
my advice is to follow up with some frequency-dependent
compression. Fast attack, fast release, sidechain keyed to the
area that’s giving you trouble; 1-3db reduction should be more
than enough to mitigate the issue, and if you use a softening
comp like an opto/tube flavor (or anything that saturates
nicely) you may even like the mellower results better than the
initial sound.
Sheen
Sheen is gloss, it is vintage air and a light coat of polish.
Sheen is the first band that I’d say gives you a sound that is
generally associated with ‘expensive’. This is also the one I tend
to reach for when I want to take an LDC with a modest
amount of top and add just a touch of the vintage Neumann

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sparkle. If you’ve tracked in a small room where the low mids
are boxy and/or the midrange has a very aggressive, papery
sound, you’ll probably find that even when you tame the low
end below 250 and scoop out some of the hash between 400-
2k, you still have a tone that feels a little flat and lifeless. A
touch of Sheen can wake things up in a gentle, unobtrusive
way.
When it comes to processing the whole mix, Sheen is the
highest band on the Clariphonic that’s likely to affect any of the
frequencies people hear when listening on lesser consumer
systems, boomboxes, cheap earbuds, and computer speakers;
so if you’re referencing your mix on a system like that and it
seems to lack the polish of more commercial mixes, this is
probably the one to reach for. If your mix just seems flat out
dull , you may need Presence; but if it’s mostly there and just
wants some of that ‘special sauce’, Sheen can be just what the
doctor ordered.
Shimmer & Silk
Shimmer & Silk give you the top, the whole top, and nothing
but the top. I group them together in this manual because
they are the only filters that will not grab any harmonically
musical information at all, they just hook the edge of the treble
and put it wherever you want it. The shimmering wash of a
ride cymbal, the brush of a thumb on acoustic guitar strings,
the air in the back of a vocalist’s mouth… this is intimacy,
gentle and easy as she goes.
These filters are the very essence of smooth, it is nearly
impossible to cull an offensive frequency out of them. While it
is possible to go too far, to make things entirely too bright, it’s
unlikely you will ever cringe from the particular spectra they
energize.
Shimmer has a quality that I would describe as electric. It is
extremely airy, but still has some density and substance
compared to Silk.

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Silk, to my ears, is rarefied air and it is as seductive as it is exotic.
It is supremely soft and gentle, and extraordinarily high; I have
heard nothing else like it on the planet.
Both of these filters can transform a handheld dynamic mic into
an expensive sounding LDC. They can take a mix that is plenty
bright and kiss of something almost invisible that, when taken
away, is immediately missed. You can use these filters as you
would any great effect, such that you’re not really hearing it,
but it’s essential to the vibe of the production nonetheless.
If Shimmer & Silk were the only bands on the Clariphonic, it
would still be worth the money… they’re that sweet.
The Balanced/Unbalanced Switch
(Rear Panel)
On the rear of the Clariphonic you’ll find two switches, one per
channel, labeled Bal/Unbal.
This switch is fairly self-explanatory. If you’re experiencing any
sort of distortion, clipping, or headroom issues, odds are this
switch is in the wrong position.

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Credit Where Credit is Due
The heart of the Clariphonic --- the circuit itself, the
component choices, and the pcb layout --- were designed by
my good friend and tone guru Kevin Hogan.
The face of the Clariphonic --- the name, front panel design,
and bizarre switching matrix interface --- were designed by
yours truly, Gregory Scott aka ‘ubk’.
To see more of KuSh Audio’s left of center products, videos,
and general aesthetic eccentricities, come on over to
www.kushaudio.com.
If you ever have any questions, issues, or ideas you’d like to
share with me, hit me up anytime at [e-mail].
Features and specifications subject to change without notice.
Manual contents, UBK, Clariphonic are trademarks of Kush
Audio, LLC.
© 2010 Kush Audio, LLC